User:DavidOaks/sandbox
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Folk etymology, in its basic sense, refers to popularly held (and often false) beliefs about the origins of specific words and phrases, especially where these originate in "common-sense" assumptions and the construction of ex post facto narratives rather than serious research (compare folk science, folk psychology etc.).
The phenomenon leads to distinct but related usages for the phrase in historical linguistics and in folklore.
Jan Harold Brunvand defines the two usages thus:
“A process by which people either
- (1) mispronounce or change pronunciations of foreign or strange-sounding words to make them similar to, or compatible phonologically with, other words in their lexicons,
or
- (2) explain from hearsay evidence how particular words originated.”[1]
In its folkloric sense the term refers to the [[sometimes fanciful urban legends) constructed ex post facto to account for the current form of words and phrases. Some etymologies are part of urban legends, and seem to respond to a general taste for the surprising, counterintuitive and even scandalous. One common example has to do with the phrase rule of thumb, meaning a rough measurement. An urban legend has it that the phrase refers to an old English law under which a man could legally beat his wife with a stick no thicker than his thumb (though no such law ever existed).[2]
The term has been used for the past century to refer to belief tales[3] about the origins of a given word or phrase.
Source and influence of false etymologies
Erroneous etymologies can exist for many reasons. Some are reasonable interpretations of the evidence that happen to be false. For a given word there may often have been many serious attempts by scholars to propose etymologies based on the best information available at the time, and these can be later modified or rejected as linguistic scholarship advances. The results of medieval etymology, for example, were plausible given the insights available at the time, but have often been rejected by modern linguists. The etymologies of humanist scholars in the early modern period began to produce more reliable results, but many of their hypotheses have been superseded. Even today, knowledge in the field advances so rapidly that many of the etymologies in contemporary dictionaries are outdated.
Association with urban legends
Some etymologies are part of urban legends, and seem to respond to a general taste for the surprising, counterintuitive and even scandalous. One common example has to do with the phrase rule of thumb, meaning a rough measurement. An urban legend has it that the phrase refers to an old English law under which a man could legally beat his wife with a stick no thicker than his thumb (though no such law ever existed).[4]
In the United States, many of these scandalous legends have had to do with racism and slavery. Common words such as picnic,[5] buck,[6] and crowbar[7] have been alleged to stem from derogatory terms or racist practices. The "discovery" of these alleged etymologies is often believed by those who circulate them to draw attention to racist attitudes embedded in ordinary discourse. On one occasion, the use of the word niggardly led to the resignation of a U.S. public official because it sounded similar to the word nigger, despite the two words being unrelated etymologically.[8]
